


All the time in the world

by alessandralee



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Immortality, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-12
Updated: 2015-03-12
Packaged: 2018-03-17 13:51:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3531686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alessandralee/pseuds/alessandralee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows it's a cliche, the dying girl develops an obsession with a trio of immortals. But that doesn't stop her from seeking him out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the time in the world

It isn’t hard for her to recognize the pattern in his thefts. She actually wonders how the authorities haven’t figured it out yet, but then she remembers none of them have her unique abilities.

It’s a bittersweet realization, as so many things are these days. The tumor in her brain gives her the abilities necessary to track down a famed immortal, but if she didn’t have it, she wouldn’t have cared about finding Ezekiel Jones in the first place.

The dying girl becomes obsessed with a trio of people who will live forever. It’s a sad cliché and she knows it.

That doesn’t stop her from getting on a flight to New York, though.

If her calculations are correct, he’s passing over The Met, MoMA, and the Guggenheim in favor of The Frick Collection. She has a few theories about exactly what he’s there for, but the pattern isn’t that specific. 

She watches from across the street as he enters the museum. He only steals at night, after the museums have closed, so for now she assumes he’s casing the place. Now that his plans have been confirmed, Cassandra is left to figure out Phase Two of this trip.

There is no Phase Two, not yet. Cassandra has no idea what she wants from this. Should she stop him? Call the police? Does she confront him in public? Does she keep following him, all the way back to the museum that night?

As clear as the pattern was in her mind, she never truly believed this would work out. She didn’t plan for anything beyond ‘Confirm Ezekiel Jones intends to rob The Frick.’

In the end she follows him back to his hotel. She was expecting either something fit for a king, a luxury suite at one of the nicest hotels in the city, or a seedy, no-questions-asked motel he could stay in anonymously. What she gets is a Holiday Inn.

Either he’s cocky or preoccupied, because he doesn’t pay her any attention, doesn’t even seem to notice that she’s followed him all the way from the museum to his hotel. They get in the elevator together. He hits the button for the eleventh floor, so she gets off at the seventh and takes the stairs the rest of the way.

He hasn’t noticed her so far, but it wouldn’t do for her to get over-confident.

Still, she’s not expecting to find him waiting for her on the tenth floor landing.

“You don’t look like a Fed,” he says calmly, in that Australian accent she assumes he hasn’t always had. “And you’re definitely not Interpol.”

“No,” she squeaks, completely at a loss for words.

“Come on then,” he sounds resigned as he turns around and walks down the hall. Cassandra follows apprehensively.

He stops in front of room 1032, smoothly opens the door with a keycard her pulls from his back pocket, and holds it open for her.

Technically, he could probably kill her in there without anyone noticing. It’s the middle of the afternoon, there’s probably no one around.

She walks in anyway. She’s come this far, so she might as well see it through all the way. And besides, it’s not like she’s got a long life ahead of her for him to cut short.

There’s an armchair tucked into the far corner of the room, and she perches on the edge of it. Just because she’s decided to risk coming in here with him, doesn’t mean she isn’t ready to run out the door at any second. He takes a seat across from her, at the end of the king-sized bed that takes up most of the room. He stares at her in appraising silence; she looks at anything other than him.

Even without her tumor-induced photographic memory, she’s certain she’d have been able to memorize the entire room before he finally spoke.

“Reporter?” he asks.

“Janitor, actually,” she replies.

“Immortal groupie?” he grins wickedly as he says it. “I’m generally an easier target than Eve or Flynn.”

Suddenly, Cassandra is hyper-aware of the bed he’s sitting on. Her eyes sweep the length of his body, and she has to admit he’s attractive. It’s as much his lazy, relaxed charm as it is his physical features. She’s not surprised he has groupies. Her research took her to plenty of fan websites; she’s seen the comments.

“Not that either,” she forces herself to say it evenly, without a hint of amusement, to make sure he doesn’t think she’s just playing coy.

The amused expression falls from his face, replaced by a grave one.

“You’re dying,” he says, and it’s much less of a question this time.

She nods.

“And you’re here hoping I have a way to save you from that,” he continues matter-of-factly.

It honestly hadn’t occurred to her. She’s seen multiple doctors, the foremost in their field. She’s undergone experimental treatments, all to little effect. What more could he offer her?

The confusion must show on her face, because he laughs a little.

“Well you’d hardly be the first person who wants to cheat death,” he shrugs.

“Is that what you wanted?” Cassandra asks without thinking.

As far as she (and the rest of the world) has been told, it was a great accident that made them immortal. A freak accident involving lightning, and some sort of algae, and some spring in Greece that dried up centuries ago. She knows that, a few years ago, scientists dug into the dirt where it used to be and found nothing unusual.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says, clearly uncomfortable with this line of conversation. Maybe there’s truth to those rumors that the Immortal Three haven’t been entirely honest about their origins.

“Whatever happened, you either have no idea how to reproduce the phenomena that gave you eternal life, or you do and you’re not sharing it with anyone. You sound like you’re used to confrontations with the dying,” Cassandra states, “and I haven’t heard about any new immortals. Whatever it is, you have nothing to offer me.”

“Then why track me down?” he asks, cocking an eyebrow up at her. 

She’d never really thought much about it. The pieces just fell into place, so she followed them. 

She doesn’t tell him that.

“What’s it like being immortal?” she changes the topic.

She’s watched plenty of interviews. Flynn says it’s a great chance to observe, to learn. For Eve it’s a chance to help, to put her centuries of experience to work. Ezekiel usually makes a joke or calls a good excuse to get into as much trouble as possible.

Today though, away from the cameras and plenty of adoring fans, he simply says, “It’s a lot of the same.”

“How so?” she asks, curious. She’s not exactly sure what he means by this, and this is as close to a long, happy life as she’s going to get. She wants to understand everything.

He takes a deep breath, “Flynn says humanity is cyclical, always falling to same desires, just building more and more destructive ways to get it.”

“So it’s basically watching mortals make the same mistakes over and over again?” she asks to clarify.

That doesn’t sound much like Ezekiel Jones, not the one in the media and not the one she’s been talking to. If Flynn is all about knowledge and Eve is all about service, then Ezekiel is all about himself. He is, after all, the man who devotes his eternal life to pulling off elaborate art heists.

“I mean, he’s not wrong,” Ezekiel tells her, falling backwards so his torso is lying down on the bed, while his legs stretch out off the edge of it. “Look at every war in the history of the world. People don’t learn. But really, that was just a fancy was of saying I’m bored.”

Cassandra can’t help it, she bursts out laughing. The man has all the time in the world, and no way to be seriously injured, and he’s bored.

He doesn’t seem fazed by her reaction.

“I know it sounds awful,” he admits, his voice projecting up to the ceiling. “I can do anything, and that’s great, but at this point I’ve done pretty much everything. There’s nothing new.”

“Space,” she says immediately. As far as she knows, he’s not a trained astronaut. There’s no way he’s been to outer space.

“I’ve tried,” he tells her. “You might be surprised to know there’s not a single government on earth that really trusts people who can live forever. At least none that are willing to risk putting me in a billion dollar rocket ship.”

Now that she thinks about it, that’s not too surprising. He certainly seems trustworthy, at least as far as known (but never caught) art thieves go, but he’s had centuries to make himself seem that way.

“Well I hear that one day soon, they’re going to start commercial space flights. After a while, it will be as normal as getting on an airplane,” she’s not sure how she came to be the one comforting him. “You’ll get there.”

And he will. He has all the time in the world. She has a couple more years. Probably. Hopefully.

They’re both silent for a while after that, but it’s a comfortable silence.

“You’re something new,” he admits, eventually.

“You said plenty of terminally ill people track you down,” she says.

“Yeah, and they always want something,” Ezekiel sits back up to look at her. “As far as I can tell, you just want to chat. It’s a little weird, considering the amount of effort it must have taken you to find me, but I like a little weird.”

“That’s not true,” Cassandra says, a little snappy. “I want plenty of things. I want to see the world, try new foods, get a dog. I want to die in my nineties, after a well-lived life.”

She tries not to get angry about her situation, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid. She wants so much, and most of it is out of her reach.

“I assume there’s a bucket list?” he asks, and Cassandra can see mischief gleaming in his eyes.

“Yes.”

She made it after her initial diagnosis, back when she was sure she’d survive this, have enough time to cross things off.

“What’s on it?” Ezekiel asks.

Cassandra blushes. There’s nothing too crazy on it, but it still feels personal to talk about. She’s never even told anyone that it exists until now.

“Lot’s of travel,” she decides to tell him anyway. “The Grand Canyon, backpack through Europe, see the Northern Lights, the Eiffel Tower,” he snorts at that last one. “Own a house, adopt a dog from a shelter, learn to knit—“

“That one’s actually easy,” he cuts her off. “And surprisingly useful.”

“Knitting?”

“Knitting,” he nods. “Now I have a proposal for you. Let’s add something to that list. And cross it off.”

There’s no way Ezekiel Jones, who just complained to her that he’s done everything there is to do in the world, is proposing something safe. It’s not a trip to the top of the Empire State Building. It’s not even a food tour of all the spiciest things New York City has to offer.

“What did you have in mind?” she can’t help herself from asking.

 

“Art theft.”

And against all logic, all reason, all morals, Cassandra agrees.


End file.
